It's the top secret new American cult show everyone's been waiting for, and it's been directed by a Welshman. Have a look at the trippy trailer for Wayward Pines here

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It's been dubbed Twin Peaks-meets-The Prisoner by US critics, boasts an award-winning cast, including Matt Dillon and Juliette Lewis, and even has Sixth Sense supremo M Night Shyamalan handling production duties.

But even stranger than the plot of the much-anticipated and mystery-shrouded new US drama Wayward Pines - the latest trailer for which has just appeared online - is the fact that the man who's helped to bring it to the small screen is from Ystalyfera, near Ystradgynlais in Swansea Valley.

Indeed, so hush-hush is the security around the storyline of the new 10-part thriller that its 39-year-old director Jeff T Thomas can't even tell his folks back home in Wales what it's actually about.

The cast of new mysterious US thriller Wayward Pines

“Other than it's the tale of an FBI agent (Dillon) who finds himself trappped in this strange Idaho town after going in search of two missing colleagues, there isn't really much I've been allowed to talk about," said Thomas who wrapped filming in Vancouver, Canada, last spring.

"Because, as you’d expect from someone like M Night, there are lots of twists and turns that I’d hate to give the game away.

"It’s very similar in mood and tone to Twin Peaks though and everyone’s hoping it’ll be just as big a cult favourite.”

And the big budget production is certainly a world away from Thomas’ humble beginnings in film – making martial arts home movies in a nearby quarry with the moves he’d learned from watching early Jean-Claude Van Damme flicks on VHS.

“I was a bit of a daydreamer throughout my teens, but I was pretty good at martial arts and won lots of local competitions,” he said.

“I was also a big Van Damme fan at the time and would watch films of his like Blood Sport and Cyborg before taking my Hi8 video camera down to where the old abandoned coal mines were to shoot some action scenes of my own with some mates.”

Realising he preferred being behind the camera, Thomas signed on to do a film and TV course at art and design school and began to make pop promos for bands like Travis, Embrace and Paulo Nutini.

Then came some award-winning commercials for Audi, Nissan and PlayStation before TV drama and life in Los Angeles came calling.

“I’d always wanted to live there, ever since I first watched [US motorcycle cop show] CHiPs as a kid,” laughed Thomas, who finally emigrated to LA five years ago to direct such hit programmes as CSI:NY, Hawaii Five-O and the Dennis Quaid Sin City-set thriller Vegas.

But it was working with a childhood hero – Henry Thomas, who played Elliott in Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning ’80s fantasy E.T. – that forged an unexpected link to the South Wales village he’d left behind.

“I was mad on E.T. as a boy and had the toys, the sticker book, everything,” said Thomas.

“So I was really excited to get to work with Henry several years ago on a missing persons series called Without A Trace.

“And, as we got talking, he turned to me and asked if I was Welsh.

“So I replied, ‘Yes’ and he then enquired if came from near Swansea.

“I was shocked and asked how he could have possibly known that – turns out he’d been researching his family tree and discovered his grandad had been born just down the road from me in Ammanford.